While chatting about all things The Office on their new podcast Office Ladies, Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly) and Angela Kinsey (Anglea Martin) revealed that a lot of the actors on the show got to make up the backstory for their own characters, like, for example, Kinsey actually created her character’s beloved pet cat, Sprinkles.
As they went over the first season’s fifth episode, ‘Basketball’, Jenna also revealed one behind-the-scenes tidbit about her character Pam’s three-year engagement to Roy.
It’s revealed in the episode that while they were saving for their wedding, Roy spent all the money they’d saved on jet skis, and as it turns out, that little twist was Fischer’s own personal addition to the Office canon.
“My backstory was that they had been saving money for the wedding and about a year into their engagement — without telling Pam — Roy spent the money on a pair of wave runners,” Fischer explained. “So he and his brother bought these pair of wave runners with their wedding money, but Roy was like, ‘We’re going to have so much fun with these!’ So it broke Pam’s heart.”
After this little detail came up in conversation with producer Greg Daniels, Fischer said, “he was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love that. We gotta put that in. We gotta put that in, the wave runners.’”
Another fun fact? Despite the fact that Pam and Jim were obviously #endgame from the beginning, Fischer and David Denman, who played Roy, became close friends quickly, and are still friends to this day.
“I have to say — this is a funny thing — David Denman and I really hit it off,” she shared. “We are good friends in real life. We especially hit it off in this episode, and it was weird because I think I had spent a lot of time talking to John Krasinski between scenes. And now I was talking to David Denman.”
She added: “It’s probably a weird thing for people to imagine, that one of my best connections on the show was with David Denman.”